updated 09:00 pm EDT, Mon March 26, 2012

iPhone 4S sees active use but mixed uptake

A new Parks Associates study obtained early has given a rare glimpse into Siri habits on the iPhone 4S. Although talking to a small pool of 482 users, Parks told the Wall Street Journal that no more than a third of these were using it daily. The most common uses, which reached the one-third mark, were either making calls, sending texts or iMessages, and running searches.

Daily dropped considerably for others. About 26 percent of owners said they were using Siri to dictate e-mail daily. The lowest adoption came from meeting creation and music. A significant portion of iPhone 4S owners have never used certain features, Parks said: 30 percent had never used Siri for e-mail, while 32 percent had never tried music and 35 percent had never made a calendar entry for a meeting.

About 87 percent of iPhone 4S users do use Siri at least once a month.

Overall reactions also weren't uniformly positive. About 55 percent were happy with Siri, but nine percent were unhappy, and the rest had mixed opinions. In anticipating a possible voice-guided Apple TV set, just 37 percent were clearly in favor, while 20 percent were actively opposed to it.

The mixed opinions come partly out of Siri being in a beta state. Along with whatever early limitations exist for language, there have also been scaling issues as it struggles to provide some voice commands. Some have noted that there are a few areas where Android Voice Actions still has an edge, such as the ability to launch an individual app.

Some have suspected that the limited new iPad support may have been Apple's acknowledgment that Siri needed to be refined before it was ready to go to a wider audience.

I don't use Siri that much

but I see no reason to not be pleased with it. My guess is the minority that disapproved of Siri a) don't have it in their language or b) are random people who claim to have the 4S but really have an Android and want to insult it in any way possible.

I don't deny shortcomings, limits, etc., but this is revolutionary! I don't care what you say. There is NOTHING else like Siri, and it will keep getting better.

It's a good start

It's a good start, I used it mainly for creating meetings, reminders, checking the weather and making handsfree calls. Where it really needs work is taking dictation, I keep having to go back and make edits because it couldn't understand what I was saying. Also I wish there was a way to confirm with Siri that you are done dictating rather than Siri detecting a pause in your speech and assuming that you're done.

Good but needs to be much better

I've grown to like Siri when it works...it's a marvelous feature. But to rely on it to handle tasks continuously and properly is a different story. It can be frustrating when it continues to make dictation mistakes and does not learn your personal patterns for words or phrases. Dragon Dictation can handle this better.

If I'm going to have to spend 3 minutes to wait (hopefully) for Siri to get right a 1-minute typed text message, then where's the benefit?

Enunciation Proclamation

Dragon Dictation, Siri Dictate and even Siri itself really appreciate it when you e-NUN-see-ate. There's a lot of accents in the US etc and a lot of slang, homonyms and other anomalies in the English language. If Siri (et al) is having trouble, slow down a bit and enunciate more. Learn to avoid saying "uh" when pausing. None of us think we have an accent, but we do. This is an emerging technology (still) and will get better, but it will never be perfect because language is corrupted, modified, remixed and mumbled too much and too fast.

I've been using Siri Dictation on my iPad for email, it's not perfect but it DOES save me time. I've dictated quite long messages to it and had to do a little cleanup, but I was stage-trained which might be giving me an edge on speaking. :)